October 1, 2013

Welcome to Security States

Welcome to Security States, a joint project of the New Republic and Lawfare designed to create a high-quality news and analysis source on the many difficult subjects where law, war, conflict, digital technologies, surveillance, liberty, and security crash into one another. Security States will draw on the expertise at the New Republic, on Lawfare’s stable of writers, and on some outside contributions too. We will cover the nexus of national security and law broadly, but with something of an emphasis on cyber-security matters and surveillance issues.

The New Republic needs no introduction to its own readership, but we at Lawfare perhaps do. Lawfare started its life three years ago as a small blog put together by three friends: me, Robert Chesney of the University of Texas School of Law, and Jack Goldsmith of the Harvard Law School. We started Lawfare as a forum for our own incidental and technical writing on national security legal matters. Rather to all of our surprise, the site has taken off—developing into a full-featured online magazine that publishes everything from book reviews, to a podcast, to original scholarship. It has also developed a regular stable of writers with unique expertise in what we call “hard national security choices.”

A few months ago, I had coffee with Frank Foer—an old friend, whose leadership of the New Republic I have long admired—and he suggested a collaboration between TNR and Lawfare. Since then, we have been sharing a fair bit of content. That collaboration worked well, but more recently, we thought we would try something more ambitious: a regular feed that brings Lawfare’s writers directly to TNR’s readers. So today, Security States is born.

Security States will produce original content of its own. It will also make certain regular Lawfare content and features—our daily news roundup, our podcast, and our book reviews—available through TNR.